// outline - full essay drafting; takeaways and bridge below
AI costs sprawl quietly through long prompts, repeated context loading, provider sprawl, oversized models, unbounded loops, unnecessary councils, and premium-model defaults.
This piece makes token discipline an engineering standard: route work by privacy tier, capability profile, budget profile, prompt-cache profile, and task class.
CTO: Spend premium reasoning where judgment matters, not where automation is deterministic.
CIO: Token discipline is FinOps for AI-native engineering.
AI leader: Every run needs a budget, route, cache posture, and stop condition.
Cost-controlled agents still fail if ownership is unclear. The next discipline is accountable agent design.